1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a print control device, a print control method, an information processing system, an information processing apparatus, an information processing method, and a storage medium. In particular, the present invention relates to a print control device, a print control method, an information processing system, an information processing apparatus, an information processing method, and a storage medium that update the expiration date/time of authentication information required for printing by a printer.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, the publicizing of services on the Internet as cloud services has become an expanding business. Along with this, the function of a print server needs to be provided as a print service on the Internet. For example, providing print services as cloud services has various advantages such that the need for hardware management for each customer can be obviated by installing print servers in a large-scale data center, and a resource can be easily added in accordance with the load on the server.
Since a print service needs to collectively manage multiple user information, more robust user management is provided using an external authentication service. A user performs his/her authentication by means of an authentication service and uses an authentication token issued upon authentication to thereby be able to receive a print service. A print service deployed as a cloud service on the Internet resides in an environment where the print server communicates with a printer over a firewall. Thus, a printer acquires print data from the print server via the Internet to perform pull type printing. At this time, the authentication token of the user who has already been authenticated for print execution by the authentication service is registered in the printer. The printer can acquire print data through a request which has been properly authenticated by using the authentication token.
However, a typical authentication service sets an expiration date/time to an authentication token to be issued in order to use resources efficiently and improve security. More specifically, the authentication token becomes invalid after the elapse of a predetermined time from the last accessed time. Thus, if a user who executes a printing operation does not execute any other operation after providing a print instruction to a printer, the authentication token may become invalid until the printer acquires print data from a print server. If the authentication token becomes invalid, the printer cannot acquire print data, resulting in occurrence of a print error against a user's intention.
In order to avoid such circumstances, as an prior art, a client system which performs batch job processing for a long time sets an expiration date/time update time for an authentication ticket to be issued from an authentication system prior to the start of batch job processing. The system includes an expiration date/time update unit that updates the expiration date/time when the expiration date/time update time is reached after the start of batch job processing (e.g., Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-330953).
In the method disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-330953, when expiration date/time information is managed by the authentication system, the client system makes an update request to the authentication system upon reaching the update time. In the case of cloud services, client systems (printers) and the authentication system (authentication server) are connected via the Internet and the number of client systems is too many, resulting in a heavy load on the network. Therefore, the method disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-330953 is not practical.